BY MIKE BUFFINGTON AND ALEX PACE
Some local school leaders were unhappy with our recent coverage of the high school graduation rates for 2017. At a recent Jackson County Board of Education meeting, an official said they were “disappointed” in our news story about the graduation rate and that it lacked “detail.”
BOE chairman Steve Bryant was more critical.
“We’d certainly like to see that (the graduation rate story) in the headlines rather than the Waffle House being smothered… that just didn’t cut it for me,” he said about a Braselton News story.
County system officials were apparently upset that we didn’t make a bigger deal of the graduation rates since one of their schools, East Jackson Comprehensive High School, had the highest graduation rate in the county and for the first time, beating rival Jefferson High School for that position.

“We are obviously being compared to them (the Jefferson and Commerce city school systems),” one official noted at that board meeting.
It’s true that our coverage of this year’s graduation rates wasn’t played up as major front page news. The reason for that is simple: Graduation rate data is not a gold-standard measurement of how any high school is achieving academically. States and individual school systems across the nation have found ways to “enhance” their graduation rates by what some critics say is little more than gaming the system.
A little history: The No Child Left Behind Act in 2002 put the focus on grad rates as one of its key achievement measurements. But the way states and individual school districts measured the “graduation rate” varied and was not standardized. So in 2012, the nation standardized how schools were to calculate their graduation rates to a system known as a “four-year cohort” formula. (This is different than the dropout rate and is not the inverse of it.)
But that new formula caused a lot of schools to see a decline in their graduation rates. State politicians and local school officials didn’t like that outcome, so over the last five years, the education community at both the state and local levels have become more aggressive in getting that rate higher.
But the way that’s happened raises questions about the true validity of the grad rates and how they are being reported.
Here are several ways the state and local school systems have found to boost their graduation rates:

(Note: The charts with the data appear only in the print edition and have been removed from this posting.)

1. The rise of independent charter schools and alternative schools that cater to weaker students has had a growing impact on graduation rates at traditional high schools, including here in Jackson County.

Foothills Charter Education High School, the “answer to the dropout problem” in north and middle Georgia according to its website, opened its Jackson County operations at the start of the 2015-16 school year on the campus of EJCHS. It is a state sponsored charter school independent from other school systems in the county.
Foothills advertises itself as a “dropout” recovery program. Its charter says the school’s mission is to “serve high school-aged students who are at risk of dropping out of the public school system without a high school diploma.”
Those “at risk” students — if they remained at their origin school — would presumably lower the graduation rate by not graduating on time, or by dropping out. But when a weak student transfers to Foothills, the origin high school benefits academically from having that student off its roster. If the student later drops out of Foothills, that doesn’t reflect on the origin school’s graduation rate.
In looking at the data for the past two years, it’s clear that Foothills is having an impact on pushing up the graduation rates of the four Jackson County high schools, especially EJCHS and Jackson County Comprehensive High School.
In June, Foothills had 123 students who were originally from one of Jackson County’s four high schools out of 155 total Foothills enrollees. (Note: Of the 155 total enrollees, 22 participated in credit recovery classes and two in Foothills Plus.)
EJCHS has consistently had the largest enrollment at the alternative school. In June, 65 EJCHS-origin students were enrolled at Foothills, followed by 42 from JCCHS, 11 from Jefferson High School and five from Commerce High School. Those numbers include both new enrollees for the current school year plus the students who had enrolled in previous years and who had not dropped out, transferred out, or graduated.
Since Foothills opened, EJCHS has had the largest number of transfers to Foothills.
Some students transferred back from Foothills to a local high school, but even then EJCHS still had the highest net number remaining at Foothills.
EJCHS and JCCHS are the only two schools in the county that had a net increase in Foothills transfers last year. They are also the only schools that had an increase in local graduation rates.
Based on this data, it’s clear that Foothills is having an impact on the higher local graduation rates, especially for EJCHS and JCCHS where weaker students are transferring out in larger numbers.
A look at JCCHS, which saw a huge improvement in its dropout numbers last year, also shows this trend.
The dropout total at JCCHS decreased 71.4 percent, while its graduation rate increased nearly 9 percentage points. During that same year, JCCHS’ net transfers to Foothills increased 325 percent.
Some of that can be attributed to the unique dynamics of different graduating classes. The dropout totals at JCCHS have varied largely over the years (27 in 2014; 19 in 2015; 42 in 2016; and 12 in 2017).
Still, JCCHS had its lowest number of dropouts and its highest graduation rate in recent years last year, data that coincides with its having more students enroll at Foothills.

WHAT WE DON’T KNOW ABOUT FOOTHILLS
When researching this article, we also sought information on transfers and drop-outs from Foothills. But Foothills superintendent Sherrie Gibney-Sherman could not provide the number of students who dropped out or graduated from Foothills who originally came from the county’s four high schools. Without that data, we cannot say how many of the students who transferred from the four local high schools subsequently dropped out of Foothills, or graduated.
According to its report for June 2017, there were 114 total dropouts from Foothills-Jackson campus in 2016-17 while the school had 14 graduates.

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2. Getting rid of the Georgia graduation test in 2015 pumped up grad rates by removing a layer of independent accountability.

When the new 2012 graduation formula hit, Georgia political leaders were embarrassed at how it lowered the state’s rates. In a bid to get the grad rates back up, the state dropped its long-standing graduation test in 2015, a test that was originally put in place to stem grade inflation and the graduation of unprepared students. Killing the state-mandated grad test was an obvious effort to pump up the state’s graduation rate by taking away a layer of accountability.
All four local high schools saw their grad rates jump in 2015 after the grad test was removed.

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3. High schools across the nation are increasingly using “credit recovery” classes in an attempt to keep students on a 4-year graduation track.

In addition to dropouts, students who don’t graduate within four years mess up high school graduation rate results, so schools across the nation have turned to controversial “credit recovery” classes in a bid to have students graduate on time.
This is similar in theory to the old “summer schools” where students would attend classes in the summer to make up for a failed grade. Today, “making up a grade” is called “credit recovery.”
While some of the new credit recovery classes do take place in the summer (Foothills offers summer credit recovery classes), many also take place during the regular school year as well. Most are online-based classes designed to help struggling students pass a course they failed so they will graduate on time.
But these online classes have come under fire and are under investigation in several states because they are alleged to be much less rigorous than regular classes and open for cheating. The NCAA generally doesn’t accept credit recovery units for student-athletes because of these issues.
Most credit recovery classes have students taking a class online, then taking an online quiz. Critics say students learn to game that system by Googling answers to the quiz, taking multiple-question quizzes over and over, or passing along answers to other students. Some students around the country have reportedly finished a semester of work in only a few days.
Credit recovery classes are mostly unregulated in Georgia and are offered by a number of private companies, in addition to a state DOE program within its Virtual Schools offerings.
One critic said the online credit recovery system is a game of “pretend:” Students pretend they’re learning, credit recovery companies pretend they’re teaching and school administrators pretend their graduates have a high school education. Another critic called the online credit recovery system a “computer scam.”
Supporters of these programs say they give kids who are on the borderline a second chance at success to get a high school diploma. And some schools are more rigorous about how they administer these classes than other schools.
Locally, JHS had the highest number of students in credit recovery over the last two years.

***4. Statistical dynamics, individual school policies and demographics also affect the graduation rate.

The size of a high school can affect the graduation rates significantly. Smaller schools are affected statistically more than a larger school when a student drops out, or fails to finish graduation requirements within four years. For example, CHS had 85 graduates this year while JCCHS had 238. A single student dropping out of CHS has a far greater statistical impact on the grad rate for that school than a single student does at JCCHS.
In addition, some schools have unique situations that play into the graduation rates. JHS, for example, allows a significant number of out-of-district students to enroll, but it has the ability to weed out academically weak out-of-district students. To an extent, it has control over part of its student population that doesn’t exist with most other schools. In addition, by pulling in high-achieving, out-of-district students, JHS is not only helping its grad rate and other testing results, but it’s also weakening the schools that those high-achieving students originally came from. That is a distortion worth noting among the local high schools.
Demographics and socioeconomics of a student population also plays a role in a school’s academic achievement, including graduation rates. Schools located in wealthier, highly-education communities tend to have higher graduation rates than school located in poorer communities. Often, the education level of a student’s parents has a direct correlation to that student’s own academic achievement and by extension, to a school’s graduation rate.

***CONCLUSION
In exploring this school data, we aren’t suggesting that all of the local school’s improvements in graduation rates are just due to weak students moving to Foothills, the lack of a state graduation test, or credit recovery classes. Local high schools are doing other things to help keep students on a graduation track, including in-school mentoring, extended time, increased counseling, better pathways to graduation and other intervention programs.
But there is no doubt that the biggest impacts on the local graduation rates over the last three years has been the ability of local schools to have weaker students withdraw to Foothills, the use of credit recovery classes and from the elimination of the state graduation test. The correlation of that data is just too strong to ignore.
We understand the competitive desire by some county school leaders who wanted to brag that one of their schools was tops in the local grad rate data this year.
But by itself, grad rates are just one piece of data and are subject to distortion. We reported the rates this year and will continue to do so, but graduation rates aren’t a gold-standard.

Mike Buffington is editor of The Jackson Herald and can be reached at mike@mainstreetnews.com. Alex Pace is editor of The Braselton News and can be reached at alex@mainstreetnews.com.

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